My Blog List

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Are You Ready for Occupy Wall Street: The Book?

Should be a very short story. The "movement" will surely be consigned to the dustbin of history by the time they plan to have this published.

Progressive publishing house OR Books will release a 200-page first draft of a history entitled Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America as soon as December 17, using volunteers from the movement's Education and Empowerment Committee, and including work by both "sympathetic writers and people who are active in the occupation," OR co-founder Colin Robinson told New York. The book's release date will mark the protest's three-month anniversary — assuming it survives the onset of winter. By then, the demonstrations will have already have been the subject of an MTV special and plenty of news coverage, but Robinson hopes his "interventionist book" will provide the most extensive chronicling so far. "Although you can't deliver definitive opinions at the moment or set out a course of action, you can record the details of what has happened so far in Zuccotti Park," he said.

I suspect the raging anti-Semitism and defecating won't be mentioned.

I like that part about the action that changed America. Feeling gradiose, aren't we?

Robinson sees the movement as "creating an alternative society in the middle of the financial center of the world," and wants to mirror that "openness and horizontal democracy" in the book's creation, but admits that's impossible to achieve completely. "I don't think you can write a book like that," he said, bristling at the possibility of calling the book an "authorized" account. "At a certain point people have to go away and write it," he said. "You can't approve every sentence. But we'll try to be as open about the process as we can." The idea for the book has not been presented at the movement's nightly general assembly meetings, but Robinson said there has been "a fair amount of support for the idea" among organizers.

I'm thinking this will be bogged down in committee.

While the book will touch on the most newsworthy moments, including the pepper-spray incidents, Brooklyn Bridge arrests, and city cleanup face-off, Robinson is also hoping to capture "quotidian detail," including "how the general assembly works, how the kitchen works, how security works," and so on.

5 comments:

Rodney C. Johnson
said...

The problem is, they do have MANY writers on their side, who are more then willing to spin this for them.

Checkout http://occupywriters.com and Lemony Snickets pro-Marxist screed. With the advant of self-publishg and Kindle it won't take them long to get out the progadna. I had hoped one of the Consertive sites would spotlight and mock these writers. they don't seem to remember that in Workers Revolts it is their like who always is turned agiant first...

Hey, it could be the movement "that changed Ameica." It could be the movement that finally made everyone reallise what a mistake it is to vote for Democrats, and throw them all out of office. That'd make it almost a Berlin Wall moment.

These Occupy Whatever "movements" have singularly failed to impress, change or accomplish anything. At this point they'll have to give them up as a bad job and try instead to re-frame or re-formulate after the fact. E.g. change the outcome by instead changing the history and hoping nobody will be able to challenge them on it.